Booker winner Aravind Adiga turns 35

Spicezee Bureau

Here’s wishing a very happy birthday to 2008 Man Booker winner Aravind Adiga, who turns 35 today. After winning the coveted prize for his novel ‘The White Tiger’, Adiga became the fourth Indian author to win the Booker.
Aravind Adiga- A profile

Aravind Adiga was born in India in Chennai in 1974, grew up in Mangalore.

He studied at Canara High School, then at St Aloysius` College, where he completed his SSLC in 1990. After emigrating to Sydney, Australia with his family, he studied at James Ruse Agricultural High School. He studied English literature at Columbia University, New York and Magdalen College, Oxford.

Adiga began his journalistic career as a financial journalist, with pieces published in Financial Times, Money and the Wall Street Journal.

He was subsequently hired by TIME, where he remained a correspondent for three years before going freelance. During his freelance period, he wrote ‘The White Tiger’. He is now based in Mumbai.

`The White Tiger`, Aravind Adiga`s ferocious debut novel, is being considered as one of the most interesting and energetic novels to appear this year.

Unlike several of the titles on the Booker list, The White Tiger has an excitingly contemporary feel, illuminating the growing divide in an already polarised India between the haves and the have-nots. It is an angry black comedy narrated by its anti-hero, Balram Halwai.

For Adiga, the book was not only fun to write - but also an uncomfortable experience. `I am, in a sense, part of what I`m skewering,` he says. `I`m middle-class, and from here [India], so my sympathies are spread out. I`m part of what I`m attacking.`

Adiga is the fourth Indian-born author to win the Booker Prize since it was set up in 1969, joining some famous names and legends. All those eligible for the prize include novelists from the commonwealth and from Ireland.

VS Naipaul won it in 1971 for 'In A Free State'. Naipaul went on to win the Nobel prize for Literature

Salman Rushdie won in 1981 for his classic Midnight`s Children

Arundhati Roy in 1997 for his debut novel, The God of Small Things

Kiran Desai walked away with it in 2006 for `The Inheritance of Loss`

Adiga, the favourite among British Bookies for the award, pipped aside Amitav Ghosh`s "Sea of Poppies", another Indian in the shortlist to bag the 50,000 pounds prize ($87,000), which goes to the best work of fiction by an author from the Commonwealth.

Earlier, Adiga's "The White Tiger" and Amitav Ghosh's "Sea of Poppies" pipped Rushdie's "The Enchantress of Florence" to make the six novels in a list full of fresh faces.